We believe that the traditional feature-driven approach to product management is flawed. Long lists of feature requests, and a non-transparent prioritization process based on gut, power, and politics result in features that nobody uses. At best that leads to mediocre products. At worst it leads to failed companies.

Smart product management focuses on your target audience, their goals, and a thorough understanding of the solutions they’re already using to address their needs. Sometimes those solutions are competing products. Other times they’re a hodgepodge of solutions hacked together by the user herself, to address a need where no formal solution yet exists.

While PMs do have some ways of tracking this information today, it typically resides in the form of qualitative and quantitative data spread across many systems. Or it remains locked away in the heads of product managers, marketers, designers, customer support specialists, sales people, and account managers — all of whom have different perspectives on what customers really need.

Getting everyone on the same page is a nightmare. Most engineers across companies don’t know why they build the features they build. Designers play catch-up user testing features that have already been built, rather than thoroughly researching user needs before the first line of code is written. Marketers hustle to understand product benefits, and even C-level executives struggle to align their companies behind clear strategies.

We are changing that.

productboard is a methodology and a platform that helps product managers and their teams design and build products that customers actually want. We put users and their needs at the center of the product management process. We help answer the nagging question “What should we build next!?” amidst a sea of feature requests, customer inputs, and competing priorities. What Salesforce did to solidify CRM as a core responsibility of customer-facing teams, we’ll do for product managers, by helping them capture and structure the information they need to make effective decisions throughout every step of the product development lifecycle.

productboard is designed for product decision-makers as a delightful, easy-to-use tool that can be used standalone, or as a complement for traditional product delivery tools.

At this stage our product is in its earliest stages. We’ve come up with some amazing designs and will continue iterating based on conversations with over 100 product managers who are looking for more visibility into why they should build any given feature in their dev backlog. My professor and the father of lean startup, Steve Blank, would be proud of us.

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